Skills to Succeed

“Collaboration for Durable and Systemic Change for Youth Employment (Skills to Succeed Grant#5)"
The project will reach a total of 5,500 deprived in-school and out-of-school youth (48% female) living in urban areas in Bangladesh. 3,500 youth (62%) will be placed in new or better jobs, paid apprenticeships or self-employment (49% female).

Project Results/ Objective

Objectives:
• To provide skills training to vulnerable adolescents and youths (14-24) in IT/BPO courses and place them to gainful employment in the supply chain of IT/BPO sector.
Expected Results:
• 4,500 adolescent and youths are trained directly in three years, and 5,500 youths indirectly through online/offline e-learning materials.
• 80% of direct reach employed in the IT/BPO jobs

1. Client Collaboration and other Opportunities
S2S would also welcome the opportunity to engage employees and business partners in project activities. Activities could include:
• Mentor youth
• Support the Project Management Committee
• Provide insights as an employer in the labor market assessment
• Support the design and development of a digital solution
• Assist the development of market-appropriate curriculum
• Train youth
• Support job linkages and/or hire youth

2. Contribution to knowledge and assets
The following contributions will be made to knowledge and assets:
• Conduct Learning Exchange to stimulate the dissemination of new ideas and the adoption of best practices from the youth employment field through quarterly learning calls, dissemination of a quarterly newsletter, and three Annual Learning Meetings.
• Develop/adapt market relevant curricula and teaching guides with input from employers that can be adopted on a system wide basis and create capacity among master trainers to train in a cascade model for scale.
• Adapt an easy to administer tool to measure employability skills, the EA Tool, in two new contexts: Bangladesh, and build capacity of school systems to use.
• Develop at least 4 additional toolkits to add to S2S’s Signature Program package to ensure documentation of approaches and replicable assets.
• Conduct research to gather and disseminate evidence on the effectiveness of innovative approaches being tested, such as workplace improvement in Vietnam and the ICT/BPO course in Bangladesh.
• Research, publish and disseminate three studies to evaluate youth employment’s contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals.
• Research, publish and disseminate a study on the role that employability behaviors play in workforce success, considering data from youth and employers in Bangladesh.
• Disseminate evidence of our research studies to contribute to building the youth employment field at conferences, through blogs and social media, and by sharing Signature Program knowledge products, including the Employability Assessment Tool package, Employability skills curriculum and resources for trainers and master trainers.

Project in brief

Accenture – Skills to Succeed Save the Children Federation, Inc. intends to provide funds to Save the Children International in Bangladesh to implement the project titled 'Collaboration for Durable and Systemic Change for Youth Employment (Skills to Succeed Grant #5)" funded by Accenture Foundation, Inc. This project will be implemented in the period of Sep 01, 2017 to November 30, 2020. The funds will provide support for a program entitled 'Education for Youth Empowerment Program (EYE)'.
The overall objective of the project is contributing directly to upskilling 5.000 deprived urban youth in Bangladesh to access decent jobs within the ICT sector, and supporting them to become active and productive citizens, and vulnerable/marginalized youth through online courses. The key target groups of the project will be deprived and at-risk youth aged 16-24 who are from poor households or schools and youth with disabilities, migrant, female, working in hazardous conditions (female 48%, men 52%).
Under the project the target groups will receive employability skills and vocational skills demanded by local employers in multiple sectors including entrepreneurship skills; IT/BPO for finance and accounting training for entry level jobs at lower tiers of IT/BPO value chain. The project contributes directly to Global Goal 8 (promoting decent work and economic growth) and Global goal 1 (No Poverty). Special efforts will be made to create an enabling business environment for both men and women, contributing directly to Global Goal 5 (Gender equality). The Young participants will learn to make better decisions for themselves and their families and they will become able to meet basic costs of health and education for their children, contributing indirectly to Goal 3 (Good Health and Well-being) and Goal 4 (Quality Education).
Save the Children International, will be responsible for implementing this project to achieve the below outcomes:
• Deprived young men and women, 16-24 years, living in the urban slums of Dhaka gain decent employment, primarily within the ICT sector of Bangladesh.
• Deprived young men and women, 16-24 years, living in the urban slums of Dhaka become active and accepted citizens.
• The learning, scalability and sustainability of the project is accelerated and improved.

Building on assets and relationships developed in previous GGs, S2S will collaborate with partners from government, private sector and NGO sector to target populations of vulnerable youth, and generate evidence for S2S’s impact on the SDG’s, while implementing for durable and systemic change on both the supply and demand sides of the youth labor market. As a result, at least 5,500 youth in at least three countries will be trained, and school systems and training providers will adopt S2S approaches and provide market relevant curricula, training methods and supports that lead to high placement rates for deprived youth in a sustainable manner. Workplaces will be safer and more inclusive of deprived youth, who will have more fair, safe, and secure jobs, because employers adopt better hiring and management practices and are aware of their social responsibility. This systemic impact, through changes in laws, policies and practices on the ground of the ecosystem that surround youth, such as government, schools and employers, will drive sustainability in the interventions.